IT WAS A meeting of metal dinosaurs, a congregation of great grain gobblers, of lumbering, snouted machines.
For one fearful moment I expected them to pick me up, winnow me from my flesh, granulate my bones and send me off to the silo.
We were all gathered where the barley grows heavy of head, delicate of stalk and the prima donna of the paddocks.
Tractors throbbed with suppressed excitement, with cabins full of instruments orchestrating on display panels the insides of their harvesting charges. Metal worms were ready to writhe inside cylinders and lift the barley into obedient trucks.
But my country cousins were taking the moisture content of the barley. This is an almost religious ceremony. Moisture content testing is the great rite of barley well-being. If it’s too high a great sigh will ripple from Wallaroo to Warooka.
It is often conducted in the boots of cars. It is attended by anxious drivers of the great machines.
The landscape, most of it barley, nods its million bearded heads in the morning breeze. Has it absorbed too much moisture from the night air, this beautiful, booming, billowing crop of dreams?
“This is a very delicate apparatus,” said my country cousins who are very delicate apparatuses themselves come harvest time, as temperamental as master violinists, playing their vast machines to the score of plenty, to the glory of national income and in praise of the munificence of Mother Earth and the Wheat Board.
One of my country cousins was awinding a sort of coffee grinder. Another showed me a complex machine of dials and indicators, probes and appendages which would give the reading.
Not even my doctor had made such fuss when I went for my last check-up. He had merely looked at me, inflated his blood pressure gadget, sighed again and sent me away, hopeless and shapeless. I always give a poor yield of vitality from the vast panorama of my paunch.
But Yorke Peninsula on a barley-brimming morning is a wonderful place. Even the breeze hushes at moisture-content time.
“Costs hundreds of dollars,” a junior country cousin told me, indicating the machine, “they don’t like too much moisture at the silo.” Turned back from the silo. Such disgrace, the truck slinking through the back roads.
My country cousins went on grinding while others waited; while the great machines were frozen a moment in mechanical immobility. The regiments of barley heads waved and the sun caught the little silos of the paddocks, galvanised islands at which the harvesters docked to discharge their grain.
So we waited. Morning sun dappled the nearby scrub, a hint of blue, moisturised sea showed through a hollow. I had not known such science in my farm days. The moisture content was something, that came from clouds and spat on your face.
When the wheat was hot and brittle and the torpid hares managed to take their languid pads from the eager knives and whirling fangs of old binders, or the rolling greasy structures of harvesters that raised dust and chaff, then you didn’t care about moisture content.
The only moisture content was in the waterbag or the billy-of black tea or it ran from under your armpits or it fell from your eyes when you got your taxation assessment.
But hush, it was time for the moisture content reading, said my country cousins. One took the crushed barley and placed it at the end of the sensitive probe. Needles danced, dials were adjusted, readings taken as a hawk hung breathless above us. Then the shouted verdict.
We’ll reap!
Thus spake the high priests of moisture content.
Silos, stand by. Roar, tractors.
Everyone raced for his machine like drivers at Le Mans. The air shook and quivered, chaff spurted like spray. Away they went, these 20th-century adventurers on their ships of grain, this cacophonous convoy in its harvest hullabaloo.
I hurried back to the farmhouse for several cups of tea. I have a big area to nurture and I like to keep my moisture content stable.
Max Fatchen